That I can definitely understand. I usually try to stay away from giving creative items as rewards because it does make things unfair.
For donating, I'd have rewards, but none that would make things incredibly unbalanced.
Some of the things I'd probably use as rewards for donating would be:
- Ranks, which would allow players to have access to server resource intensive items/mods sooner (like Speed 3 Upgrades for ender quarries or access to dimension creation from RFTools).
- In-Game money, to use towards player shop purchases/rental/etc.
- Additional land claim space to protect larger areas.
- Starter kits for some of the primary mods like AE2/TE/IC2 to help players get started, but it would be starter materials only, not end-game mats like enderium, etc.
Do those kinds of rewards seem too unbalanced or would those be acceptable in your opinion?
I love ranks, I would love a server that gives ranks not just for donating but for other things such as helping out other players with mod advice or building advice or just simply being active on the server. I actually donated on one server just for the rank as sad as that is.ws Honestly I'm not completely sure if I would like to see dimension creation restricted by ranks. I don't mind seeing it banned due to server resources it takes but for a player to have unlimited access to powerful dimensions because they donated is a big deal. Now if you were to say donate X amount of money and get access to one dimension that you can custom create that I would be fine with. As long as there are restrictions in place, I would hate to see someone pay for a UU-Matter ocean dimension or any other dimension that boasts a lot of powerful resources. Sure other people are going to get into the dimension but overall it's a pretty game breaking dimension. Whether said player would have to power the dimension they paid for themselves or not is debatable, I would probably say that with good restrictions the power cost wouldn't be high and as such the power could be part of the donation.
In-Game money is fine, assuming the items the players can purchase aren't over the top powerful. I've seen some good servers run admin shops. Things like silverwood saplings that were available in a server that was strangely devoid of silverwood trees for example was nice.
Land claim IMO is probably the best reward, being able to claim about 4-9 chunks is good for any standard player, being able to spread out is nice for other players.
Starter kits would be good. I would avoid something like AE2 probably just because how powerful the mod is but even then giving say a few 1k storage drives or so wouldn't be too bad.
One of the things that I was thinking about lately that I loved about another server I was thinking of joining is restrictions on player item selling. The basic concept is player A can't give player B a diamond producing bee unless player B is at or close to the level of making a diamond producing bee. While I was searching for servers last I came upon the MineYourMind(MYM) group of servers and they had a list of all end-game items for various mod packs that were forbidden to be sold publicly through chat. This seems nice for a few reasons, a New player can't buy currency and then buy top tier items yet it allows players to trade items as long as they progressed to that point.
I would honestly say that last part is overall a very minor thing though, just a nice rule.
If the server you are considering created turns out to be running infinity under expert mode let me know, I'm almost through my IE:Skyblock playthrough and just have a few small things I want to finish up and wouldn't mind playing expert mode in a normal world on multiplayer. Don't play multiplayer too often because I like to play on a relatively new server where I can get a fresh start with a lot of new players and have fun seeing the community spring up.
